By Lesley Walsh
A PHOTO of the late Queen Elizabeth bestowing an OBE on Dr Agnes Lunny in 2005, hangs in her Bangor office, blanched after years in the sunlight.
But its faded appearance belies the vivid stamp she has left on Positive Futures, a pioneering charity she co- founded 30 years ago and from which she reluctantly retires this year.
Dr Lunny, no stranger to physical challenges, has been championing disability rights since before disability legislation even existed, but she leaves a landscape for local disabled people in much better health through the charity.
Positive Futures supports people with learning disabilities, acquired brain injury and autism and is a ‘person-centred’ service that moulds itself round a person’s needs, not the other way around.
Demand has consistently grown since its inception, and the charity recently announced the expansion of its service with the recruitment of 20 new employees who are to join its ranks in the near future.
It will be a tough act to follow, for whomever replaces the inspirational woman with a larger than life character and a vocation seemingly as strong as it must have been in the earliest days.
At 66 the registered blind woman, originally from Belleek in Fermanagh, has come a long way since the age of eight when the onset of her visual impairment caused fear in her parents for her future.
That was compounded when she lost them and her brother in a fire at just 16. But despite those overwhelming challenges, she managed to carve out a positive future for herself, while also becoming an ardent advocate for others experiencing life at the sharper end.
The journey to founding Positive Futures began after leaving her social worker post in what was known as the ‘borstal’ at Lisnevin in Millisle. There, she was dismayed by the number of children being dealt with within the juvenile justice system who had learning disabilities.
“It just broke my heart,” she said. “First of all that this was the place that people as young as 12 or 13 went to regardless of their disabilities but also the fact that so many people had learning disabilities -– so I suppose that triggered something in me.”
Agnes then took up a post with Barnardos at Manse Road in Bangor, working with children with disabilities, most of whom had come from the controversial Muckamore Abbey complex in Antrim.
It was around this time that the essence of Positive Futures fired Dr Lunny’s approach, captured by her mantra that prevention is better than crisis.
“A lot of those at that children’s home were fast approaching adulthood, but there were no plans being made for them because the reality was so bleak; the world and the services were so bleak. It was either back to nursing homes, residential homes or back to Muckamore.
“Can you imagine your 18 year-old going to a residential home or a hospital?” she asked and recounted the heartbreaking fears of one particular elderly person she has worked with, who was pondering the fate of their disabled adult child once they were gone.
“They told me ‘every night I go to bed and pray my daughter will die before I do’,” she revealed.
That’s the crisis Agnes wanted to avert, in light of the climate at the time. She reflected: “The way that people with learning disabilities have been treated over the years has been terrible.” Society as a group, must bear some of the responsibility, she believes. “There were never protests outside Muckamore, so in some ways, we’re all equally culpable for the way people were treated.”
She acknowledged however, that when action began to be taken ‘we all got behind it’ but ‘we were really lethargic about it’.
“For me it was actually ‘how do we do something different,” she said, and soon after, she teamed up with Alan Kendall of the Barnardo’s children’s charity.
Assessing a number of possible avenues to support the growing Barnardo’s children, she said with the help of Bangor man, the late Boyd Turner and the Department of Health, a solution began to take shape in 1995, as Positive Futures.
“There were nine people from Barnardo’s who became the first people to be supported by Positive Futures, children who were transferred to this brand new organisation.”
The local Health Trusts soon got on board, with managers telling Agnes ‘we don’t know what you’re doing but we like it’.
“The goodwill that we received hasn’t gone away,” she said.
A social worker working in England, Paul Roberts, then entered the scene, and swiftly became instrumental ‘in helping us to challenge the thinking in Northern Ireland, which was a little bit behind the thinking in England’ in terms of housing young adults.
Her future husband, Paul Roberts helped by outlining the benefits of housing young people in their own homes in the community and ‘not one big housing block’.
Just because ‘the learning disability was the significant factor’, people living with such challenges did not necessarily have to live together, she said.
“There was no sense that this is an individual. They were seen as a homogenous group and the individuality of people was not recognised – and that really is at the core of Positive Futures,” she said.
“We are supporting an individual, with unique needs. We don’t place people in buildings, we assess people’s needs and then we find the accommodation. We help them live ordinary, meaningful lives – lives built on choice, control and belonging.”
